Character · Ponyo
Ponyo
A goldfish tastes ham, decides she would rather be a girl, and floods an entire coastline getting there.
In Otakana the clue reads: Goldfish girl who wants to be human
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Ponyo
- Letters
- 5 · Easy
Ponyo escapes her father's undersea laboratory, drifts into a glass jar, washes up on a rock and gets rescued by a five-year-old called Sosuke. He gives her a slice of ham. She gives him a face full of enthusiasm, learns the word for it, and sets about becoming human, which in her case involves sprouting arms and legs and running along the tops of the waves.
Hayao Miyazaki drew the film in 2008 with pencil and paint and no computer imagery, using something like 170,000 hand-drawn frames, more than any Ghibli picture before it. The sea takes most of that effort. Waves move like animals, fish are shaped out of water itself, and the ocean behaves as a character rather than a background.
The story is loosely The Little Mermaid with the moral machinery removed. Nobody suffers for the transformation and nobody is punished for wanting it. What remains is a small boy keeping a promise and an ocean rising because a child got what she asked for, which Miyazaki stages as delight rather than as disaster.
Spelling PONYO
PONYO is five letters and the NY pair is the awkward bit for English eyes, since we rarely put those two together in the middle of a word. In Japanese it is a single sound, nyo. The name is not a fish word at all, since Sosuke invents it on the spot. Two O's, second and fifth, and no long vowel to trim.